Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

Well, for starters I would:

1. Focus on making the company profitable by cutting down on staff and resources. Seriously, Twitter doesn't need thousands of employees, a large HQ and all that other fancy stuff. I think a team of about 30 people could probably run it fine.

2. Get developers on board again. Open up API access, stop shutting down/blocking projects, etc. Make people feel like they could start a business on Twitter's platform, without the rug being pulled out down the line.

3. Get rid of the Trust and Safety Council. It's currently a bunch of left wingers that don't care much for freedom of speech, which groups like the ACLU suspiciously absent.

4. Improve moderation. Kick out terrorists and nutcases on the 'left', stop looking for every excuse to ban right wing users and generally treat everyone with respect all around.

5. Try and make the Android app more usable. Because at the moment, it's really awkward to use and gets rather slow at times.

6. Stop using verification and unverification as a punishment. Really, it's like Twitter is being as confusing as possible here.

7. Have the timeline set to how it used to be. Remove the 'show best tweets first' crap from any accounts unfortunate enough to still have it enabled.

8. Make things like URLs not count towards the character limit. I think Gab already does this, and it's very useful.

> It's currently a bunch of left wingers that don't care much for freedom of speech...

There's this idea that I hear mostly from the "right" that "freedom of speech" means "let people be assholes to one another with impunity."

We need to fight back when the government attempts to abridge free speech. That's what the ACLU is good at. But Twitter is a community -- a community under no legal obligation to include toxic users.

"Freedom of speech" gives people who don't fit in at Twitter the right to go build their own community that's as toxic as they want amongst themselves.

As a Twitter user, I don't want to have to worry about being attacked or experiencing floods of toxic responses to something I might say. Thankfully I don't. But I do see toxic content directed at people fairly regularly. Toxic content meaning: Stuff that attempts to make no point, just attempts to spread hate or fear.

Twitter is anything but a community. It's a platform with a multitude of communities and individuals, many with conflicting goals.

Of course.

"Community" meaning something people opt in to use, is what I meant.

But the company should have an over-arching set of community standard so people know what's expected of them when they participate.

30 people? Could you list what sort of team breakdown you are seeing for this?

I'm really struggling to see how to maintain/develop and work on such a complex problem at that scale with a team of only 30.

When Facebook bought Instagram, weren't they running with something like 15 people?

Sure I guess they were small but their problem space seems to be similar to a more standard CRUD. I could be wrong but the one to many and many to one relations within Twitter seem much harder (at least from my perspective).

Both are super tough at the scale they run :)

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